Hog_No32

Real life? Take the Iranian frigate Sahand that was sunk in 1988 by the US Navy. It took them 3 Harpoons, 4 AGM-123 (which basically were rocket powered GBU-16s) and a pair of Rockeyes to sink that ship...

I don‘t fly in VR and two weeks ago I changed my monitor (after 8 years) from a 1920x1080 to a 2560x1440 curved screen...it‘s like I have a new simulator and I finally can spot other aircrafts even when they are more than a wingspan away...:lol: But seriously it really helps with the aiming when strafing targets. I also cheat a bit by zooming in on the HUD.

I can‘t very much compare our Hornets M61 with any other aircrafts gun in DCS with the exception of the A-10s GAU-8....and I think we all agree that one is in a different league for sure. But I really find the M61 not to be that bad. Admittedly, I‘ve not tried it against an APC or even tanks. But I‘ve killed A LOT of softer targets like SAMs, radars, Silkworms and a few other units with it rather easily. When I get my aiming right it even takes just a short burst (~50-80 bullets I would say) to kill one of these targets. Dive angles vary between 15 and 25 degrees. I pull the trigger as soon as the IN RNG cue comes up, sometimes a bit later (at shallower dive angles). Can’t really talk about aerial targets because I am so damn bad at this stuff (being a mud mover from my very first days in DCS). I sometimes even have trouble killing a Hip with the Hornet regardless whether I employ missiles or the gun. But that for sure is because of my very poor air-to-air skills and not the weapons I use...

Yeah, that is the cool thing about their range: I drop the Harpoons and turn the jet back to base and put it on autopilot. I then watch the missiles in F6 view all the way to impact. By then, the jet is already overhead home and I can quickly refuel and rearm and do it again and again...:)

It worked for me (so it’s not just theory) also using the HPTP function like you but I used slightly different bearings and destruction distances for each station. Each found a target and scored a hit. Not saying it is bug free, in fact ED clearly said it is „heavily“ WIP. I just haven‘t encountered any so far, instead the weapon always worked as expected so far. Maybe I‘m just lucky...but I don‘t complain ;)

You have to program each weapon individually and set all parameters 4 times, including the FLT and HPTP (if desired) options. That is as long as you don’t want to use the default settings (FLT MED, no/unboxed HPTP). Easily done using the STEP OSB. Once all are set, a good practice is to cycle through all the stations again verifying that indeed correct launch parameters are set for each weapon.

You did mean Harpoon (AGM-84D) when you said HARM (AGM-88C), don't you?

I'm reading that many people are not happy with the lethality and effectiveness of the Harpoon in its current state. My feeling is that there are some unrealistic and too high expectations on the capabilities of the missile. It was the Viggen and its magnificent Rb-15F missiles which dragged me into anti-surface warfare. I've found it so fascinating that at one point I almost exclusively flew anti-ship missions with the Viggen and that got me to study a lot about that kind of warfare, the tactics and weapons used in real life and what we can do in DCS. In hindsight, the perfect preparation for the Hornet :-) People that are expecting the Harpoon to be the one-shot-killer missile mostly get two things wrong: 1) Survivability of the Harpoon As others mentioned earlier, the Harpoon is a large and subsonic missile. As such, is easily detectable by ships radars and other sensors and due to its moderate speed, it is a juicy target for missile defence systems. Note that most of the warships (in DCS) actually have more than one missile defense system. At longer ranges the Harpoon can be shot down by naval SAMs and at closer range the CIWS can kill it in its terminal flight phase. Flying at sea-skimming altitude and/or doing a pop-up maneuever in the terminal flight phase can help to dodge the SAM and CIWS bullets but it is by far not a guaranteed protection method. (This is actually where the Rb-15F is superior to the Harpoon because it does a last-second zig-zag maneuver at sea skimming altitude which is often pretty effective in avoiding the Russian CIWS). The only effective countermeasure here is to overwhelm the enemy ship(s) with just so many missiles so that it/they simply cannot shot down all of them. 2) Lethality of the Harpoon The AGM-84D has a 221 kg penetrating blast-fragmentation warhead. This is about as much explosives as you have in a Mk83 bomb. Try sinking a destroyer, a frigate or even a cruiser with a single Mk83... Admittedly, the Harpoon when flying a sea-skimming terminal profile is intended to hit the ship near the waterline, hence it has a slightly higher potential to do more critical damage to a vessel than a bomb dropped on its superstructure. Nevertheless, it will take a couple missiles to sink a warship. Have a look at youtube, there are a bunch of videos of Harpoons and other anti-ship missiles used in training and tests against some old ships. You might be surprised how small the effect of a single missile hit usually is. It is one thing to disable a ship (making it unfit to perform combat or even move). Sinking a ship is a completely different story. During Operation Praying Mantis when the US and Iranian navy had some engagements in 1988, the Iranian frigate Sahand took hits from 3 Harpoons and 4 LGBs. It was on fire immediatly but it sank only after a couple hours. Speaking about damage modelling in DCS: I found that to be rather good with ships compared to some other units. With a bit of damage the ship will lose speed or stop completely, burn and not be able to employ any weapons, i.e. defend itself any further (which makes sinking it a whole lot easier, of course). So to sum it up: A) you need many missiles to have somet getting through the defense layers of warships and b) you need a enough missiles actually hitting the ship to sink it. To give you an idea of the magnitude: My favorite anti-ship mission is one where my target is the Kuznestov battle group which in my mission consists of the Kuznetsov carrier itself, the Moskva (Slava-class cruiser), one Grisha, two Neustrashmiys and one support ship. This is a very, very well defended battle group. Before I tell you what and how many assets I use to attack them: I really sink all of them in usually 1 out of 2 attempts, so a 50/50 chance (flown that mission at least 30 times now with only minor changes to the mission). Flying against this battle group are: Wave 1 4 flights of 4 Hornets, each loaded with 4 Harpoons 1 flight of 4 Tornados, each loaded with 2 Sea Eagle 2 flights of 4 Viggens, each loaded with 2 Rb-15F Wave 2 3 flights of 4 Hornets, each loaded with 4 Harpoons 1 flight of 4 Tornados, each loaded with 2 Sea Eagle That gives 88 missiles in Wave 1 and another 56 missiles in Wave 2. Oh and there also is a Ticonderoga cruiser sending Harpoons as well (I think that fires 8 Harpoons in a few seconds interval and then reloads for quite some time). So you can tell it really takes A LOT missile to kill an entire battlegroup. Just the Kuznestov itself is so well defended that it really is hard to sink it. I believe it takes more than 7 or 8 direct hits before it will sink. But it also is A LOT of fun really! :smilewink:

Adding to the FLT options: The lowest selectable setting "LOW" means the missile while cruise and begin to search at 5000 ft MSL - but only if you launched it from 5000 ft or above. You can however release the weapon at an altitude below 5000 ft MSL and it will cruise in that altitude (i.e. it will not climb to 5000 ft). There is a limit though below which you cannot release and that is indicated by an "ALT" or "ALTITUDE" (can't remember exactly) indication on the HUD. Just climb a bit until the warning disappears and you are good to launch. In my case I released 4 Harpoons at around 3200 ft MSL and they cruised at that altitude until they found their targets and descended to sea skimming altitude. Browsing the web I found a source stating that the lowest release altitude is around 2500 ft AGL. That seems to be close to what is currently implemented in DCS.

Excuse me but this is nonsense. Whether the ship has a radar or not is completely irrelevant here. The Harpoon works well against cargo ships, I had 2 out of 2 hits on the dry cargo ship. The Harpoon always uses its own radar to find ships. That is also independent from the launch mode, BOL or R/BL (which will come when the A/G radar is there). What CarbonFox described sounds like a problem with the launch geometry. A combination of a too-close search range and a too-high FLT altitude may cause the missile to not be able to prosecute a target even if it "just" saw it on the radar. You want the missile to open its seeker early enough to see the target based on the FLT altitude set. It is obvious that in order to prosecute the same ship once from FLT LOW and once from FLT MED, the Harpoon needs to start searching earlier (=at a greater distance from the target) at FLT MED because it will travel more during the descend to sea skimming altitude. I have good results when I set up the harpoon to FLT LOW and set the search distance so that it begins searching about ~10 nm out from where I suppose the target to be.

No, you have to set the PROG for each individual weapon/station. But it‘s not such a big deal (compared to programming multiple JDAMs). Done it yesterday but I intentionally used slightly different bearings for each weapon to attack a battle group with multiple ships. Worked like a charm.

I really had a blast last night with the Harpoon! Thanks ED! Dropped 8 Harpoons in total, 7 of them hit the target, 1 was shot down by its target (Chinese Type 52 DDG). They are a lot of fun to work with but you need to think a bit about the geometry of the attack to come up with the right numbers for the bearing and distances, especially when using the HPTP function and when the target is moving. But actually this little complexity is what I really like about them! :smilewink:

When parameters that you entered are invalid you will get the relevant indications on the HUD like „SCH/DSTR“ when the distance between the entered search range and destruction range is too small. Sure I don‘t know whether this will be implemented in the first release of the Harpoon.

As much as I am looking forward to the Harpoon, I immediately noticed that Wags wording leaves a bit of room for interpretation as to when we will get the Harpoon in the OB. He says „soon“, not „in tonights open beta“... Let‘s hope this is just a „defensive measure“ in case something goes wrong tonight...:music_whistling:

If you allow me to express my opinion on this: I‘d rather prefer the ED team to work on systems and features for those that want to fly the Hornet realistically and follow the correct procedures instead of modelling the behavior of the jet when not following the procedures. Unless time and resources permit... Really no offense here, just my personal opinion

In the A-10C I basically always used the auto-lase option but I always changed the auto-lase time from the default 8s prior impact to 12s. That got me a decent hit rate north of 95% I‘d say. Since we release the GBUs usually at higher speeds in the Hornet compared to the Hog the 15s sounds very reasonable to me but I didn‘t had much time to drop LGBs recently in the Hornet.

Did a mission last night where I took off from the carrier, delivered some ordnance and refuelled and rearmed at an airbase. I didn‘t notice any differences in performance after the second takeoff. Whenever I land and takeoff again and regardless whether I refuelled/rearmed or not, I always press the FCS RESET and TO TRIM buttons and keep them depressed for a second or two, set Flaps to half, check TO trim is correct on the FCS page and I never have any issues.

That is correct.

Thanks. Glad to see I‘m not the only one who got confused by the title...:smilewink:

What are you talking about? Refuelling the Hornet using the boom on the KC-135 (instead of the drogue on the KC-135MPRS)??

Very well said, sir! Enjoy the airshow (insert triple jealous smiley here). Seen many demo teams in my life including some legendary and excellent ones like the Red Arrows, Patrouille France, Patrouille Suisse, Frecce Tricolori and some more and many of them many times at different shows. I‘ve seen the Blue Angels only once but their display was somewhat apart from the others, from start to finish. Simply breathtaking! Really enjoy it, man :thumbup:

I think to really answer this question one would need to have very detailed (and likely classified) information on what the thresholds in terms of signal strength are for an RWR to go off. The way how I understand them (and that is rudimentary) they look for electromagnetic energy of certain frequencies and of a certain strength. For sure, from a fighter‘s radar which is 200 nm away only a very, very small amount of the energy will reach you on the ground, provided the signal is not blocked/reflected on its way. So I think it really comes down to the tuning of the filters and at what signal strength it can detect and classify an emitter from the noise.

That‘s why I began with „Nevermind“...

Nevermind then. Jell-O (or Sunshine, not sure...) told the story of doing an FCF which required shutting down one engine. He then accidentally went below 85% on the running engine and therefore MECH kicked in...

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